Last of the Blue and Gray: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War

Unabridged Audiobook

Publisher: Tantor Media

Date: October 2013

Duration: 7 hours 4 minutes

Summary:

Journalist Richard A. Serrano details the mystery surrounding the last two veterans of the Civil War—one real and one a fraud.

In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117, blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending.

Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one, according to the best evidence, nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.